Weather News

Easter trade revives hopes for tornado-hit store

Busy weekend trade has removed any doubts about rebuilding the Koonoomoo store, ripped apart during last month's tornado.

Store co-owner Brett Childs says immediately after the storm, he did not believe the business would survive.

However, he says amazing support over the weekend has restored his faith in community.

Mr Childs says despite working out of a marquee, the Easter trade was outstanding.

"You really find out how you are perceived in the community and what you've done for the community when that support comes back when you're in need," he said.

"The comments they make, we had a bloke yesterday in tears because he's been coming up here 28 years, up here camping every year and his store has gone, he's shattered that it's gone and that was the feeling amongst a lot of people.

"Our normal trade traditionally is massive on Easter and we thought crikey we've got no roof, people have heard about it and maybe they won't come up because they can't come up and camp when there's a tragedy but this year they just came up in their droves.

"We had seven people, seven friends helping me out on the day trying to sell whatever we could."

Clean-up

Meanwhile, the Moira Shire Council will start putting more skip bins in place this morning at a number of locations affected by the severe storm.

The council's recovery manager, David Booth, says the focus this week will be the removal of asbestos and more hard rubbish from properties.

He says the number of volunteers arriving in the area to help residents clean up has been terrific.

"We've had some contact from groups and probably from the perspective of managing a good number of people, that makes our job a little bit easier to make sure that we are managing groups of people and they go straight into ... places to help the finer clean-up of debris around homes," he said.

He says the clearing of remaining hazardous limbs and trees will resume after the long weekend break.

"We've got some contractors in place now working to remove some asbestos from homes that are either damaged or levelled," he said.

"The lead up to Easter we provided large skip bins for residents to get rid of their hard rubbish.

"We'll be looking to put more skip bins out this morning, they'll be out through the week to make sure that people can easily get rid of their rubbish."